Analysis: Taiwan's Party Politics and Controversial Legal Changes

TaiwanPlus News

As legislators in Taiwan once again come to blows over controversial legal changes, TaiwanPlus spoke to political risk analyst Ross Feingold about what they reveal about the country's partisan politics.

Transcript

00:00I think when a lot of people see this footage of fighting in the legislature,

00:03they may think this is a government in disarray that is dysfunctional. Are they wrong?

00:09They're wrong in the sense that this kind of pushing and shoving or blocking the doorway,

00:15even more violent interactions between legislators from the different parties

00:20is somewhat out of the ordinary, but it actually is quite ordinary. Taiwan has a long history of

00:26but eventually legislating proceeds, even if one side or the other does not like the outcome.

00:33Let's say all of the amendments that passed eventually make it into law. How big of a

00:37change would this be? Is it the kind of thing that would impact politics for years to come,

00:42or is it a more marginal change? I think these are significant changes.

00:46Increasing the quorum requirement for the Constitutional Court could have implications

00:51for laws that haven't even been passed or other types of challenges to whether something

00:56is constitutional or not. Thinking of things like marriage equality, where it was interpretations

01:02by the executive branch that were challenged as being unconstitutional and eventually were found

01:08to be unconstitutional. The same thing with the allocation of government revenues between the

01:13central government and local governments. If that remains as is post-amendment, that means going out

01:20into the future, the amount of money that the central government could spend is going to be

01:24significantly reduced, and the amount of money that local governments can spend, where that's

01:29basically handed over to them for spending, will increase substantially. This would also benefit

01:34the Chinese Nationalist Party because they control far more local governments at the moment than the

01:40Democratic Progressive Party does. Is this about separation of powers or is this purely partisan?

01:45In other words, if we were to see the party of the president and the legislative majority flip,

01:50you expect to see a DPP majority reverse these amendments?

01:54No, I would expect them to continue to support these changes because if they had a legislative

02:00majority, it might give them more power. So again, when the shoe's on the other foot,

02:05we see the parties acting in the opposite way to which they previously acted,

02:09and that's one of the traditions of Taiwan democracy.

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